As someone who’s studied Chinese, is familiar with how Chinese characters work, and has already learned hundreds of characters, looking at the Khitan characters is such a surreal experience; they undeniably resemble Chinese characters, but so many things are also just off about them, it’s bordering on uncanny. I can just stare at them for hours.
As someone who has not studied Chinese a single say, and remembers like 2 characters without any knowledge of their meaning or pronunciation, only looks, looking at Khitan is surreal too for me. It's just the same vibe, but not it at all. It's like looking at Georgian nuskhuri (which looks like a lost cousin of latin)
As a Mongolian speaker, it’s fascinating to see such familiar words being written in what, at first, seems like Chinese characters. Thank you for these new insights!
@Jason Voorheese About the Chinese or the Khitans? The Khitans they knew because the Western Liao dynasty fled to the steppes after they had fallen in China proper. Russians had contact with various nomads trough the ages, hell, many words even as basic as, say, the bag, come from Turkic languages because of said contact. So it's no wonder the Russians had contact with the Khitans. But as they were so far away, they named whole China after them, whilst contact with China proper was estabilished due to their expansion eastward in the 1600s.
@@zedernaga9174 It is quite senseless to say so. Like saying that the world for tea in Russian("chay") is a loanword from Turkic or\and Iranian languages. Not, it's a loanword from Chinese, but it came through Turkic and\or Iranian languages.
@@太守苏定交趾 Yes, I know. What I'm talking about here specifically, is that we need a video exlusively about them and their language, as the were eventually absorbed by the Uyghurs.
10:07 just sounds 100% Mongolian if I ignore the pronunciation. Sounded like “Kidan guren usgetei”, literally means “the Great State of Khitan has a script” in Mongolian. In Mongolian, Khitans are called “Hyatan” or “Kidaan”.
Yeah the "para-mongolic" hypothesis is really not mainstream. Most articles I've seen say that Khitan is probably mongolic (though maybe not directly related to existing mongolic languages), though we just don't have enough evidence yet to be sure - but we have even less evidence to suggest that it's in fact "para-mongolic". The author of this channel always prefers obscure hypotheseis to the scientific consensus anyway.
About two years ago I was in Hong Kong, and a friend took me to a linguistics bookstore tucked away in a small office building room that was going out of business and clearing out its books. One of the books on sale was a heavy volume on the Khitan small script. I have been mad at myself ever since for not bringing enough cash to buy it.
NativLang, you're inspiring many young people, both in Mongolia and around the world, to consider with awe and curiosity the linguistic origins of our obscure region--and I thank you for that. Khitan is such an underrated language, especially among the Mongols. Even though we study it to be part of our ancestors, because we don't study the logograms, we're so ignorant and disavowing of them. I only learned to differ when I read Gyorgy Kara's "Books of the Mongolian Nomads".
Technically they weren’t that much an ancestor of modern mongols, but more of one of the ancestors of many northern Chinese and Manchus, alongside some Mongolic speaking peoples who claim to be the direct descendants of the Khitans.
As a native Chinese speaker, the small script gives me the impression of writing Korean Hangul with Japanese Hiragana. These scripts are clearly related to Chinese characters, just like Hiragana, but can combine with each other to make a single sound like Hangul. This video is really fascinating. If you want to know more about related stuff, look up the Tangut language online. The Tangut people founded their kingdom to the west of Khitan and the north-west of Song dynasty, and were destroyed by the Mongolian conquest too. Their script looks even more Chinese-ish for non-speakers, although it's more complex in appearance and having its own way of forming new characters.
'Middle State'(Diaud Gur) literally means China. 'something' sounds 'hulʤi' which might mean 'people' as 'hun' in Mongolian. So the whole phrase is 'The Great China of Khitan people'.
@098765 Craper Essentially it's "Great Khitan of the middle empire". The concept of "middle empire" is equivalent to China. The Mandarin name of China, 中国, literally means "the middle country".
@@giorozaitien646 It's better to say "Chinese" when it comes to scripts because all dialects (or languages) of the Chinese language (family) writes the same
@@ianhomerpura8937 not quite. They borrowed that lineage from one of the Clans that they conquered during the early 17th century. The Nara Clan of the Eight Manchu Banners were the direct descendants of the Jurchens of the Jin dynasty while Nurhaci's Aisin Gioro Imperial Clan was from the Huligai People of Southern Heilongjiang region of North Eastern China. The Huligai's weren't really related in any way to the actual Jurchens but after the creation of the Eight Banners, their descendants in a way could be considered part Jurchens due to Clan intermarriages.
@@QuanHoang-qd1ye Yes. The Wanyan clan was the direct descendant of the ruling imperial family of the jurchen Jin Dynasty. However, there were also other clans that existed as well during the Jurchen's rule of northern China in the 12th to 13th centuries. After the Jin's fall to the Mongols in 1234 AD, a few Jurchens returned to their ancestral lands in northeast China and eventually manifested into the Nara Clan that encompassed the Hoifa, Yehe, Wula, and Hada tribes. Most of the Jurchen people after the fall of Jin Dynasty assimilated into the local Han culture and changed their surnames to Han surnames to avoid prosecution from the Mongols and Southern Song rulers.
@@VJBILL1 대금제국이 멸망하고 만주에 남아 있던 여진족의 족보는 전부 거짓에 가까움 몽골족의 침략을 피해 다른 여진족 부족의 침략을 피해 만주를 돌아다니면서 이주했기 때문에 조상을 알수 없다 순수한 대금국의 황족과 여진족은 몽골이 침략했을때 중원에서 없어졌음 만주에 남아 있던 여진족의 족보는 위조라고 봐야한다 완안부족의 후손이라고 하는것도 거짓말 일거다 완안부 사람들은 전부 중국한족이 되었다고 봐야 하는게 정답임
I would really like to see a post on the Tangut language/script. It would be somewhat similar to Khitan in the sense that it is a non-Chinese language adopting a cumbersome Chinese influenced script for their language. In the case of Tangut, it's known as one of the most obtuse scripts ever used on earth, consequently, it's largely undeciphered. Even the basic Chinese numerals are so insanely complex in the Tangut script, check out the wiki for sure, super interesting.
Yes please! 'The [Tangut] language is remarkable for being written in one of the most inconvenient of all scripts, a collection of nearly 5,800 characters of the same kind as Chinese characters but rather more complicated; very few are made up of as few as four strokes and most are made up of a good many more, in some cases nearly twenty. It is extremely difficult to remember them, since there are few recognizable indications of sound and meaning in the constituent parts of a character, and in some cases characters which differ from one another only in minor details of shape or by one or two strokes have completely different sounds and meanings.'
Same in Japanese as they both use identically the same grammar. I don't know which came first though or maybe this Khitan had something to do with it. Hmm? 池の底、木に鳥が座った Not sure how "in" and "on" are being differentiated but that's what I got.
Basque would use similar grammatical structure but not quite identical phrasing, something like "pond-in is-that tree-on bird sits" (article "the" or rather nominative declension ignored for simplicity), the main difference is that Basque would use the copula (the verb to be, or one of two versions of it) which NE Asian languages seem to not use (right?) It is a phrasal formation that some have likened to the way the eagle would think (first the context, then the details), while Indoeuropean (or seemingly Chinese too) do it the other way around, like a snake which sees first the details and only then the context.
@@kameyouho4597 I do too. Asides from that, there's a chance the individual characters in the small script gave inspiration to the scripts of Japan, with the exception of the Kanji script.
@@visserskarel I do prefer syllable bloc (bit biased) and would like to see it in future languages too. I suspect english writing will morph into emojis...🏝👈🏖🙃😁
This language is full of, "We'll write it like this, but we'll know to _really_ pronounce it like this." Researchers will have the same trouble with English, when it dies off.
@@jgr7487 with thai it's easy (well, easy once you've memorised the classes the consonants belong to) to pronounce anything that's written. it's the other way round that's difficult.
@@NikolajLepka What if Islam takes over and requires people to stop speaking English and burn all audio recordings? You're not allowed to disagree in Islam.
8:03 the "Water bottom-in tree-on bird sits" part might sound very confusing, but as a mongolian, it made a lot of sense to me. It roughly translates or is interpreted to "Усан доорх модон дээр шувуу сууж байна", meaning "On top of a tree* that's submerged, a bird sits.". *"Мод", or tree, doesn't mean only a tree, but it can also be used to describe wood, or wooden, or of a tree. So in this context, it could mean a log floating on top of water. It's crazy to think I would even realize that our language has this weird bottom-in, or tree-on types of prepositions. But I'm no language expert so i could be talking out of my ass here. Only from a native mongolian :).
Ooh nice to see a native mongolian here! Nativlang's next video is on Mongolian - investigating it's history, scripts, and the Mongolic language family :-) Can you read Hudum Mongol bichig?
Same thing, for me, as a Finn. Though, the preferred word order in Modern Finnish is SVO (though, technically, the word order is free), possibly by an internal innovation, or by Indo-European influence, as we Finns migrated from West Siberia to the coasts of the Baltic Sea, to Finland and Estonia.
Khitan has a very important lesson to teach us. When you invent a new language, you *must* write extensively about its pronunciation, grammar, and origins in _at least _*_one_* mainstream language of the time and publish furiously! Bonus points if you can get copies into government libraries.
They didn't invent a language. They invented two ways to write their language. And their language was mainstream. I would be surprised if they didn't write grammars btw. The origin of most grammatical texts is administrative need to teach the language of a ruling class to administrators whose native language isn't the same. Grammars were likely just lost. Keep in mind that all this happened a very long time ago, and even for areas with preserved texts (like Mesopotamia or Egypt) we only have a very small part of what was actually written.
Every time I watch Nativlang's videos I ask myself why are there some people who click in dislike for his videos? They're greatly educative and fun to watch.
9:10 The -ur / -ul suffix of the Khitan season words remind me a lot of Korean gyeo-ul "winter" and ga-eul "autumn". Maybe *-ul has the meaning of "season"?
Actually, alexander vovin argues that there's some korean loan words in kitan language since both goryeo and kitan claimed to be successor goguryeo. for example the video mentioned state in kitan is "gur" and in goguryeo language, it was "kuru" and modern korean "gol" "of state" in modern korean is "goleui". So i think kitan might be the one mongolic branch that was affected by foreign languages such as korean
@@junheel2291 The word for country here you are talking about is clearly of Chinese origin. Korean "guk" (국), Mandarin "guo" (国), Japanese "koku", Cantonese or Southern Min which has preserved the Middle Chinese pronunciation "gok/kok/guok" (國). The native Korean word for "country" is "Nara" (나라)
When I was just starting to study linguistics, this was the kind of thing I wanted to do. Alas, I was pushed toward topics I could make a career out of.
@@littleolliebenjy wasting a whole bunch of money trying to become a computational linguist, and then realizing that what I'd really learned was how to write
Me too! I always say my dream job would be a paid linguistics nerd. For practical reasons, and to pay back my scholarship, I chose to be a Speech Language Pathologist. It’s a fun and stimulating career, but it’s not a “paid linguistics nerd”. These videos are SO WONDERFUL for my linguistics-obsessed side.
@@susanhill6438 fortunately, since I said that I’ve discovered that my calling is Explaining Things to People. I have a long-term technical writing job now, and it feels like exactly what I want to be doing
No offend but, real Mongolian don’t use Russian words. I have a friend from Inner Mongolia province, he said only Mongolian in China know real Mongolian language. They call the language that Mongolia using now is a branch of Russian language.
@@mastersuper7149 Spoken language is the same in the North and South. We tend to use cyrillic script for formal settings(work related) and latin script for informal (such as social media). Mongolian script which originated from the old Uyghur alphabet is now being taught again to children in primary schools nationwide. Any "real Mongolian" would not try to discriminate between the two...
@@mastersuper7149 that’s pretty funny, because you wouldn’t call e.g. pinyin “a branch of English/Romance language” when its just mandarin in a different writing system lmao
Having studied classical and modern Chinese for 7 years and in that time also learning some classical and modern Mongolian and how to read hangeul, I loved this and at the same time am sad I know nobody who might appreciate it the same way
Some more fun confusing names: The Song dynasty's Beijing was in Daming, in modern Hebei province, some 450 km south of modern Beijing. Dongjing, as pronounced in Japanese, is "Tokyo", i.e. the city of Edo became the Eastern Capital of Japan.
There’re various of “Jing”(capitals)in China. The northern capital usually refers to Beijing , the current capital of the PRC; the Southern capital is Nanking, the old capital of ROC, also knows as kingleing(金陵)or JohningFu(江宁府) in Qing dynasty,the East capital was Kaifeng, the capital city of Song Dynasty, while the west capital was Changan(current day Xian)where the terra-cotta armies were unearthed, was the most famous ancient capital of China.
It’s funny to me, I have heard of this language once by accident. In modern Farsi, and Dari, China is known as (چين) “CHIIN”, when I used this word with a teacher of mine from Tajikistan he looked at me, quite perplexed. And asked what country I meant by that. I described it and he said “oh you mean Khitan?” apparently this name is still used, if somewhat incorrectly to modern ears. I believe it probably came through Turkic/Mongolic sources to Tajikistan and language there and stuck due to the relative isolation of the mountainous country.
TacticalMoonstone that’s grand. If you have sources I can site later, or use for further research, I’d really appreciate it. I’m trying to sort through influences in Tajiki and anything helps. Also, if you’re anywhere near DC I’ll buy you a cup of coffee to say thanks.
Thank you so much Josh! I've been interested in this mysterious people since I learned about their empire. Indeed, in Russian Khitans are called кидани (kidáni, singular кидань - kidáñ), and they gave the name to the country of China (Китай - Kitáy), as someone had already said in comments.
Request: The next time you do a “What [Insert Ancient Language Here] (And How We Know)” video, would you consider covering the ancient Egyptian language(s) as a possible topic? I’m a huge Egyptophile, trying to teach myself Middle Egyptian, and an audio-video guide on its pronunciation would be super-helpful! Thanks!
Might as well as concentrate your efforts on studying academic published papers in Mongolian than trying to do the research in English or other languages. Lots of research materials are already accessible to Mongolian readers just not in English. If you have read enough books on Mongols, you would notice that all these books are just quoting one another in that limited knowledge and source. Secret history of the Mongols don't even have some decent translation and Jami al Tawarikh is not even completely translated into other languages yet. Then there is that blue chronicle that I don't think is translated into english at all.
Thank you for this video! The Khitans and the Liao Dynasty has particularly drawn my interest after I watched Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils in chinese. In the story, Qiao Feng, one of the main characters grew up in and is known as a hero in Song china, but in a turn of events, he finds out that he is actually a Khitan, and becomes an outcast due to, among many other things, the war and fighting between the Liao and Song Dynasties.
zx p You’re acting so surprised... I never said I was outside of china (people use vpns) and also I did mention that I watched it in chinese; the chinese-speaking community extends way beyond just china. But yes, I’m American-born but my parents are from Taiwan and I was introduced to Jin Yong by my mom. DG&SD was actually the very first one I watched.
@@BobTheHatKing you could watch it in Chinese? Not bad, not many ABCs can! Some can be quite fluent in modern speaking Chinese but a period drama may use some archaic terms.
@@tsuikr my mom explained a few of the archaic terms in the beginning but after a while you kind of just pick it up. It’s not like they’re speaking full on Classical chinese
It's just so amazing were uncovering the secrets of this language right now. It shocks me how little we preserve of what we know existed...full cities undiscovered, famous extinct languages we know almost nothing about, species we only know from scarce drawings and with a bit of luck some skeleton.
It's been almost 15 years since last I encountered the Khitan script as my world history textbook made a brief-ish mention to them. I forgot about them altogether for the rest of my life until now. It's an odd trip down memory lane for me. They jump out at me as extra interesting for its weird outward similarity to Chinese characters despite not at all. As a Japanese speaker Chinese characters are totally familiar to me; whilst at first glance these guys sorta look like they could be obscure characters that just happen to have long been obsolete, on closer inspection they reveal themselves to be entirely different script, which is like a reverse aha moment where everything that seemed to make sense actually doesn't. It's almost uncanny, if anything. Just in case some of you might find both of the Chinese characters and the Khitan look all the samey, I guess it's not too dissimilar to coming across a new set of alphabet that don't look exactly like Latin, Greek or Cyrillic but look vaguely similar. That's the sort of impression I get when I look at these scripts. It seems to me as if they learned the concept of logogram from the Chinese and then they somehow decided to make their own from scratch instead of modifying existing ones like folks around the Mediterranean borrowed the Phoenician alphabet.
I just learned about the existence of Khitan Small Script a few days ago when I looked at what's coming out in Unicode 13.0 soon. And here's a video about it! Thank you.
Korean and Mongolian sentence structure and thought logic in their languages are quite similar. I was taught by a Korean linguist that Hangul was inspired by Mongolian and Sanskrit. Probably, that's why...
Khitan haplogroups are closest to the Hunnu, their descendants are Daur. Mongols and Buryats are also the genetic descendants of the Huns. And the closest descendants of Xianbei turned out to be Orochens (Tungusso-Manjurian group)
With "large script" being logograms and "small script" representing sounds and syllables, this reminds me of kanji and hiragana system in Japanese. Also, the grammar pattern of "Water bottom-in tree-on bird sits" looks uncannily similar to Japanese as well.
"this reminds me of kanji and hiragana system in Japanese" I can see where you're coming from, but there's an important detail to keep in mind: the large and the small script never seem to appear in the same text, meaning that they do not mix.
There is a similar writing system in the same period in this region, the Tangut writings of Western Xia. Though Tangut is a Sino-Tibetan language instead of Khitan's Para-Mongolic origin , the writings were made in the similar manner in which elements from Chinese were made to represent local ones. And the scripts also look like 'not-right' Chinese. Just Like Khitan, Tangut was forgotten until the recent century. However, it is now much better deciphered than Khitan. Because Tangut people just left so many volumes of their writings, many of which are translations of Chinese literature. Researchers can just check the Chinese counterpart to know exactly what Tangut people were talking about, thus understanding how their language works.
Good luck to you! English is full of unnecessarily difficult, Latin-derived words like that. As you probably already know, "recalcitrant" is a fancy word meaning "un-cooperative."
@Evi1M4chine I don't know what's the history of the Romanian word for "recalcitrant", but there are different sets of Latin derived words in Romance language. The majority emerged together with the languages, so those would be patrimonial words in the languge. Others were incorporated later as borrowings, after the languages were already well differentiated. Those usually come from use in the cultured elites of different times, from sciences, law, politics, or religion. Some times, the original word gets incorporated twice, first as a patrimonial, and later as a cultism: collocare (Lat) -> _colgar_ (Sp, pat); collocare -> _colocar_ (Sp, cult). Sometimes there are both both a "latinism" and a patrimonial variant: in _vitro_ (Lat), _vidrio_(Sp). Etc.
yes..some explanations sound familiar to me..as we're a Turkic sub-group, kagan is king, qağan .. ordo/ordu means army, jau means enemy, the aglutinating also a key charateristic of Turkic languages..some endings might be understood better by considering our suffixes.. in our history we name them as Qitai and Qara Qitai
Interesting! My big takeaway from this story is how important it is to have an easily decipherable script. Reading should be as simple as possible for anyone who wants to read your language.
Good for you! From my experience, step 1) phonology, 2)morphology, 3) vocabulary, 4) syntax, 5) writing and translation. Use a thesaurus to create a dictionary. Have fun!
Very interesting video, and very misterious language indeed! I would like to make a suggestion for a future video: the interesting indigenous languages of the Iberian peninsula before the Roman conquest: Celtiberian (celtic), Lusitanian (pre-celtic, celtic, italic?), Tartesian (unclasified, indo-european?) and Iberian (language isolate?) :)
This sparked some old memories. In college early this century I ended up with a discussion with one famous Croatian Academic about early Croatian language and somehow we got to the point that a lot of old words had base in sort off Chinese and we had an old word for China from start of the first millennium "Kitaja" and we called the people from there "Kitajci". The idea being that we at the time had trade routes with them that went through Siberia, and contact. Then the contact was lost, and later when it was reestablished through silk road the name changed to "Kina" and "Kinezi". But if this is right, it is another civilization that was traded with back then. Fascinating. Of course the text mentioned in this video were not known of back then when we had that discussion.
Interesting, vowel harmony and the general structure of the language makes it very similar to some Turkic and Tungusic languages. But the syllables being grouped together in small blocks as well as being arranged to \p\t\k\ and b\d\g\ makes it similar to some features of the Korean language. Perhaps this could give us a hint into the origins of the Korean language or perhaps the influences that made Korean language what it is today?
Zachary Yan Could be... Mongolian historians consider Khitans as proto-Mongols. “Daiqin” sounds like “Daichin” in Mongolian, which means “warrior” or “brave”, but I must admit that I don’t know the name origin. What I certainly know is Manchurians wrote “Daichin Gurun” as “Dulimbai Gurun” in Manchurian script a lot. As Manchurian script was developed based on Mongolian script, I can read majority of Manchurian writings. I heard “Dulimbai” in Manchurian stands for “Central/Middle” in English. Scholars say 30% of Manchurian vocabulary match Mongolian.
Enkhbilguun Erdenetsogt interesting in didn’t realize the part about Daichin meaning “warrior”, might be a pun. As far as I know it’s just a transcription of the Chinese term 大清 (pronounced like Dai Qing at the time). 大 is the epithet given to every major Chinese dynasty, however the origins of the 清 name are more obscure.
Perhaps you can discuss the Tangut script at one point? It's like someone took Chinese logograms, thought they were a good idea, then made their own, but stuck to only a few Runic-like strokes, repeated again and again.
The writing slightly resembles Korean script in the way that each character looks like one whole character but is actually in fact made up of different parts that tell you how to pronounce it
Quyen Luong does it make a difference? Which one came first is not part of my point. My point is that that they resemble each other. Khitan script resembles Korean script and vice versa. Same thing.
seeing an archeological discovery from kyrgyzstan: :D realizing it was under the soviet union and remembering how devalued central asian archaeology is under capitalism: ;-;
I think Tangut is a similar script where people are luckier at deciphering them. And of course, Tangut script is like Hanzi and Khitan large script, as they used words mostly of monosyllables. But the "drawback" of that is that it resulted in thousands of characters to be deciphered.
Very interesting and worthwhile video. Actually, I had heard about an early attempt at introducing a syllabary in China. This may be that attempt. An attempt at deciphering the syllabary appeared in a massive volume on alphabets and syllabaries of the world published in the UK about 55 years ago.
It's kind of messing with my head how "kitan" sounds more similar to the bulgarian word for modern day China (Китай/kitai) than what most other countries actually call China.
That’s because we are all families of the Altaic language, even though some don’t like nor acknowledge the notion “Altaic language”. Mongolian, Khitan, Manchu, Korean, Japanese and Uygur share a distant common ancestor, most likely Aramaic. We all have common grammatical structures. i.e. the usage of “de” ᡩᡝ in Manchu is the same as “de” で in Japanese, all meaning “do [action] at [some place]”. They are pronounced differently though. Also, we all have the SOV structure.
The Khitan people are the origin for the first Western name for China, "Cathay." East and South Slavs, and Central Asians still call the Middle Kingdom "Kitai." In Mongolia, they call China "Хятад-Khyatad." "Central Asia" refers to Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Some linguists have recently pointed out lexical links between Khitan and Middle Korean. I wouldn't be surprised if some languages from or related to those spoken in the Three Kingdoms of Korea influenced the Khitan people and their language.
Khitan was a northern nomad who received China influence and establish their civilize on city system then they found their dynasty named " Liao ". Afterward they were destroyed by another normad "the Jurchen". Then they fled westward to set up Khara Kitai(western kitai).
@@mailasun started learning a few days ago. I'm not comfortable with the script yet☺. So could you transcribe it in latin script or translate to English?
@@mailasun I can probably trandliterate it into latin script and then maybe understand it but it would probably take 30 mins at my current level of proficiency.
8:04 >If that already reminds you of another language, we'll come back to you in a second. It does remind me of another language, and you didn't come back to me. Edit: I was thinking of Japanese. Didn't realize Mongolian uses the same system.